Greg James: Stop sleepwalking through life! Find your childlike self-belief
Happy Place
Fearne Cotton
4.6 • 15.2K Ratings
🗓️ 6 October 2025
⏱️ 77 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
What did you love doing when you were 10 years old? Broadcaster Greg James reckons we all need to prioritise fun and silliness more, and thinking about your childhood passions is a great place to start.
In this chat, Fearne and Greg talk about how bleak, boring, and anxiety-inducing being a responsible grown up can be sometimes, and why that means it’s vital to choose to laugh every day.
Greg also explains why it’s important to stop and ask yourself if you really want to get married, have kids, or earn lots of money, or if you’re sleepwalking into someone else’s vision of a perfect life.
Plus, why did 21 year old Greg think he had a chance with Fearne when he first arrived at Radio 1...?
Greg’s book, All The Best For The Future, is out now.
If you liked this episode of Happy Place, you might also like:
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and a massive welcome to Happy Place with me, Fern Cotton. This is the show that helps you let go and take life less seriously. Today I'm chatting to Greg James. |
| 0:11.6 | You want to get married? Society sort of says, you must get married. And then it says, you must have children. You must do this. You must take it. You must do a job. We must do a serious job. And it's sort of looking at all those things and going, |
| 0:22.7 | are you absolutely sure that you're doing all the things that you want to do? And at the same time, |
| 0:28.7 | reminding yourself of all the childhood passions that you had that make you you, you. Because I do sort of think that you at 10 is sort of the most pure you you can be. |
| 0:40.3 | Well everyone, I'm fulfilling the back to school at this time of year cliche by feeling like |
| 0:45.6 | shit. Of course, my kids have come home with like every germ known to man and I feel like |
| 0:50.7 | I'm swallowing a golf ball when I talk. I actually felt quite poorly when I was |
| 0:54.5 | recording this episode with Greg. But luckily I know Greg well enough to have been able to feel |
| 1:01.1 | comfortable and capable of hosting a podcast episode whilst feeling like shit. I'm really not very good |
| 1:07.5 | at feeling bad. And it's always that moment when you have to learn some like good life lessons when you feel ill, don't you? Because if you're like me and you can't sit still for a minute and you need to be constantly doing on the run and distracted, when you're ill, oh my God, it's all really confronting, isn't it? You have to like think about things you don't want to. |
| 1:28.4 | I don't like it. I'm going to have a tantrum. Um, so today I'm working from home. I'm going to be |
| 1:34.8 | laptop in bed vibes. Just feeling shitty. But I know loads of you are too. There's all sorts |
| 1:41.0 | of bugs going around. So if that is you, I'm with you, I hear you, |
| 1:45.2 | I've got you. This is actually the perfect chat to listen to if you are feeling a bit crappy |
| 1:49.7 | because it's just a really lovely conversation which hopefully you can hear is between two great |
| 1:56.4 | mates. I've known Greg for 17 years. And do you know what? I went away from this chat thinking, |
| 2:02.0 | oh fuck, I could have asked him this |
| 2:03.3 | or forgot to reminisce about that. |
| 2:04.7 | We didn't really do too much reminiscing. |
| 2:06.9 | And we've had so many silly things happen, silly stories, |
| 2:10.9 | really fun nights out, |
| 2:12.4 | like being shit-faced at gigs |
... |
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